Is there a collected Gygax Q&A?

[Hairfoot]

I was meandering through the archives and noticed the "Q&A with Gary Gygax" series of threads. I didn't take much interest in them when they were current, but wouldn't mind reading them now.

They're a bit messy, though, with lots of questions interspersed with occasional answers - which, of course, are the point of the thread.

Is anyone aware if a collated, edited version of the conversations is online?

Incidentally, a quote I like in what I've read so far:

As for online play, it seems a natural recous=rse when a group of old friends becomes separated. With audio and video components, the NEtMeeting becomes very close to the face-to-face experience when all were in the same rom, eh?

So much for grognard techno-fear.

 

[vagabundo]

It would make a good enworld project to collate all that juicy info.

Maybe a new group could be formed with interested volunteers...

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

See also the "Xagyg's Wisdom" section of the Dragonsfoot forums.

 

[grodog]

There are are few archives available:

1. the ENWorld Archive threads themselves
2. my downloadable archive of the ENWorld threads @ Index of /grodog/temp/egg
3. Joe "Greyhawk Grognard" Bloch has mined the Q&A threads for Greyhawk information for his Greyhawk Lore project @ http://www.josephbloch.com/Greyhawk/Greyhawk Notes.txt

 

[Hairfoot]

Cheers for the tips. Looks like the threads are still the best version of themselves.

As for Vagabundo's idea, I at its most basic, all it really needs is Pladoh's posts collected in one document, since he quotes the questions he's answering. I might cut and paste as I go and see if the result is readabale.

 

[JohnRTroy]

One project I was thinking of someday undertaking is archiving all of Gary's public correspondence, including the messages I saved from his mailing lists (which go from 1997 onward--I save everything), messages from the message boards (ENWorld, Dragonsfoot, TLG, and others), etc, messages from Greytalk, etc., and placing them on one site. We'd have to just include his responses rather than the whole thread because messages are copyright by their writers, and I'd probably want to get explicit permission from Gail Gygax to do that due to copyright concerns, since she inherited Gary's copyrights.

The only thing other than time would be what would be a good content management system to handle that sort of thing? I don't know of anything that was designed to handle short bits of correspondence like that. I've been learning about Wikimedia but I'm not sure that's the best one for the job. That's probably the biggest concern--how to make an archive that's easy to browse, search, sort by subject (Greyhawk, LA, etc.).

 

[grodog]

One project I was thinking of someday undertaking is archiving all of Gary's public correspondence, including the messages I saved from his mailing lists (which go from 1997 onward--I save everything),

I may have an query for you, then, John: I was trying to research the earliest mention of EGG's Old Guard Kobolds a few years ago because I was positive that he had discussed them in one of his old Yahoo groups, but I wasn't ever able to find the play accounts I was looking for. Perhaps they were from the pre-Yahoo lists??

messages from the message boards (ENWorld, Dragonsfoot, TLG, and others), etc, messages from Greytalk, etc., and placing them on one site.

I think a central achive is an excellent idea.

The only thing other than time would be what would be a good content management system to handle that sort of thing? I don't know of anything that was designed to handle short bits of correspondence like that. I've been learning about Wikimedia but I'm not sure that's the best one for the job. That's probably the biggest concern--how to make an archive that's easy to browse, search, sort by subject (Greyhawk, LA, etc.).

Any kind of CMS or database + web front end should be able to serve up the discrete pieces of content, and any good indexing search engine should be able to query them readily. The old Greytalk Archive that Morgan Olden had built was based on Lotus Domino and received email updates from the email list, so that it was always current. In any event, there are a number of open source CMS and search platforms that could be used to drive this kind of archive.